Jim Rothnie, EMC Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, said, "The ability to create simplified views of complex, multi-vendor environments and apply automated management capabilities across them, is a massive feat. To do it, and to do it right, management applications must coordinate all three layers - on the server, network and storage system - and all managed as a single entity. ECC/Open Edition provides the management foundation for these next-generation requirements, and will serve as the knowledge base upon which users will build a logical view and deploy automated control across their entire storage domain."

The company said that EMC WideSky is based on five years of success in providing application programming interface (API) access to advanced storage management features, extending EMC management software to non-EMC environments.

According to EMC, ECC Replication Manager consolidates into a single point of control the knowledge gained through thousands of EMC replication software deployments. It operates in combination with replication technologies -- such as EMC TimeFinder(TM) today and EMC CLARiiON(R) SnapView(TM) and is planned to work with non-EMC solutions in the future.

EMC said its Enterprise Control Center StorageScope(TM) (ECC StorageScope) software provides customers with software to reduce costs associated with the deployment, monitoring and management of heterogeneous information storage resources. According to the company, StorageScope is an open application that automates the collection, analysis and reporting of data from all storage elements in an enterprise, delivering real-time and historical reports of storage allocation, usage and configuration details.

Joe Tucci, EMC President and CEO, said, "The growing complexity of our customers' environments has imposed an artificial ceiling on their growth potential. The goal of AutoIS is to remove this barrier over time by helping customers reduce complexity, lower management costs, and automate many labor-intensive and inefficient processes. Today marks the beginning of the most significant wave of new product introductions in EMC's history. Under AutoIS we will apply the weight of EMC's massive software R&D investments to simplify customers' heterogeneous environments."

Bill North, Director of Storage Software Research for International Data Corporation, said, "Businesses are finding their IT environments awash in increasing complexity. The primary task at hand is to find a way to manage this complexity while driving higher levels of efficiency. EMC - with AutoIS - is applying every one of its considerable strengths to this most critical issue."